[dcewcrrec]

Does anyone else feel like it should be illegal to make someone go through 3 or 4 interview stages, essentially making them work for free, only to not give them the job?

On another note, if your code base uses very niche software and there aren't too many people out there who know it, what's the process for hiring an engineer that will be able to learn it? What do you look for?

[Traster]

I don't think you can sensibly say that most interviews are making people "work" for free- you're not going to get any productive work product out of an interview unless you're literally making someone do a trial shift in a coffee shop, which I think people would agree is scummy. That doesn't really happen in Tech. I can pay you to do our coding test, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that 350 different solutions to the exact same toy programming problem has any value to my company. Also, what am I going to pay you? Minimum wage? £20 or so? We could do that, but I'm not sure it would make any difference to anyone but the most marginal candidate.